A "demonstration that [something] exists" would involve a proof of existence, which is impossible since it boils down to a definition of existence.
Truth, as I used it, is what actually happened. Of course, now you got me to thinking that since there's no way to prove what happened, there may be two or more possible pasts that are equally valid and that can't be eliminated by Occam's Razor...
I promptly vanish in a puff of logic. I'll be back once I figure out how to resolve this. You make a very good point. I think you're the second person on Slashdot that I happily declared a loss of an argument to...because I didn't consider something. (The other debates kinda degenerated through lack of responses from both sides.)
For something like this, you are certainly in the right to demand that the boss use something else for security, simply because of the potential for abuse. This is for encrypting dangerous communication that you don't want authorities or enemies to see or to be able to know that you wrote.
Re:how about "creationism" crap?
on
Bad Science Awards
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Of course you can't see a logical reason to accept religion. That's not the point. I don't see a religious reason to accept logic. Your instinctive trust of logic is pretty much equivalently rooted to my instinctive trust of God.
The scientific method is powerful and is logical. I agree with it. I have never said that I don't believe that science works, or that it is incorrect. I have never said I believe, and in fact I don't believe, that God created the world at once so that evolutionism arose from a mass of confused scientists and evil conspirators. I am a scientist at heart, as much as I am a Christian.
Yet science is only valid within the realm of science. Your saying that logic precludes a deity is no more valid than my saying that the Bible precludes evolution.
I also believe in Jesus Christ because of what you may call the scientific method: many repeated experiences of the power of God. Note that I do not take Scientology on faith. In it I've seen many repeated examples of corporate abuse of people.
If you want to believe in some crazy story that some other person made up, feel free; but schools are for educating people with things that are useful, not making them believe lies.
"Lies" and "useful" are not opposites. There are, of course, useful lies; as examples from education, there's the kindergarten one that you can't subtract 5 from 3, the middle school one that -4 has no square root, the high school one that subatomic particles are in perpetual motion, etc. There are useless truths, also. You're trying to abuse the connotations of words to help your argument. "some other such nonsense", "superstition (also known as "religion"), etc. are overgeneralizations that you're using to attack religion where doing so serves no purpose except to inflame.
School is perceived to be teaching people truth. Most people don't realize that school teaches you the easiest, most useful explanation -- the few who do will hopefully be able to rationalize creationism vs. evolutionism. If you tell people that science is a model of the universe that's useful for some purposes, then there should be no problem with what's past that. Too often, this crucial fact is ignored. Your statement, "it doesn't claim to be 100% correct", is only true literally. Most people believe this claim, and that's where the problem is.
It's hard to believe that even here, on Slashdot, "news for nerds", so many people are completely ignorant of what science is.
It seems you are the ignorant one; your post contains the hidden misconceived assumptions that science is meant to approach truth (it is meant to make a model of it), that science in the scientific community is science as taught in schools, that science is taught as merely a theory, that religion is incorrect therefore it should not be taught, and that scientific truth is indeed actual truth. Science is a self-consitent, closed-system model of observable data about the real world. It can never be the real world.
Re:how about "creationism" crap?
on
Bad Science Awards
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
The problem is that lots of people have the mistaken assumption that science (and in general, what they learn in school) is "true". Science is simply a self-consistent closed system that models the real world. I agree that science and religion are separate, and neither belong in the other's place. But when we have the state forcing science education combined with a common assumption that the real world is the scientific model, we have a problem.
In Slashdot, posters fear we may have a new X on our hands?
What's with the meme craziness? We went through Soviet Russia and Korea and now to China. Can I finish up the important Communist countries and create In Soviet Cuba, X smokes cigars?
Re:how about "creationism" crap?
on
Bad Science Awards
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Then you better explain that "science" is only a pragmatic, physical explanation of observed results -- it can make no claim to being "truth". Science is useful, since it's the best way of analyzing things. But it's entirely possible that a deity created the universe as it is such that science reports these results, and science is too small in scope to be able to refute that possibility.
Honestly. Some people treat science like it's a religion or something (pun intended). It's only an explanation. If anything, science is an alternative theory to common organized religion just as much as creationism is an alternative theory to evolution.
The People have RIghts. The Government has Powers. There is a difference. Specifically, that Rights are inalienable, and Powers are revocable.
For the purposes of this and almost all discussions that don't mention it, we assume that people have accepted the social contract, and delegated some of their rights of self-rule to the established government so that they may better live with others. You may call these "powers." I call these "rights", since they stem from the natural human rights, and since revoking them (not merely reinterpreting them) amounts to abandoning the social contract, and that seems pretty serious for just video game sale rights to unaccompanied minors.
So, given that these are delegated rights/powers/social contract/whatever you'd like to call them, is my original argument (except for the wording) faulty?
This has been bothering me...that open-source apps, probably inheriting from some UNIX-culture heritage, find some holiness in version numbers.
Give the first thing that works the "1.0" number. The first time it really works, give it 2.0. Let 3.0 be a good version, 4.0 be feature-complete, and 5.0 be really workable.
Or with browsers, try to match the existing numerology: versions 1-4 roughly correspond to the HTML versions, with 4 being reasonably scripting-complete, 5 is an improvement on 4, 6 has extra features, 7+ are major improvements.
I doubt Firefox has much reason to get to 2.0, so I'd prefer to see them drop the "1." part of the number once it gets to about 1.3.
Tell that to the kid who got beaten to death after his friend watched wrestling on TV, to the family of the overavid Korean gamer who starved to death while addicted to one game for days, to my chemistry teacher whose mildly autistic son cannot be exposed to even cartoon violence for fear that he may go emulate those actions in school.
Not yet, but I imagine that it soon will be. The Government thinks it is a better parent than you and knows what is best for your family.
Huh? Your argument runs, "No, but I would claim it to possibly be so because I like to attack the government. I attack the government."
There are restrictions on governmental rights. This is the reason retailers (aka evil corporations) normally check for age on mature games: the parents are supposed to approve the game for the kids.
Although I wish it would just block images below, say, 10x10, or just for messages that are almost possibly spam (but not enough to be filtered). It's really annoying to have some newsletter in graphic form display as a big gray rectangle with unsubscribe and copyright info below it.
Since wardriving was accessing other people's privately-owned networks, with a reasonable expectation of privacy (most people won't try to wardrive for a connection when they don't have their own), possibly for the purpose of accessing other computers on the network behind the firewall.
About the public/private thing: driveways, a large lawn/garden, private parks in housing communities, private roads and parking lots, etc. are still private property on which you can be convicted for trespassing. Even the local mall can have you arrested for trespassing if you violate their rules (no loud music, no spamming cars with fliers, etc.). So it's pretty hard to claim a WiFi network is "public" -- which you're probably basing on the fact they didn't secure it. Is it considered "public" if you use a combination lock on something with a keyhole on the back and other people may have the master key?
We've got a pretty nice (technically nice, not helpfully nice) filter at our school district's big router that blocks sites by category. I'm sure you could unblock just "hacking" for this activity. Most porn sites, banner ads, Goatses, etc. are thankfully blocked - I've never accidentally come across one at school.
That's quite an impressive writing piece for something you just whipped up for slashdot. You've restored my faith in the school system.
Fallacious causation there. I find that my spontaneous discussion skills are far more improved by practicing writing on Slashdot than by anything we've done in class.
Hopefully this'll help me on the New SAT's essay....
I'd suspect that you are what could be called libertarian idealist, that is, if you could create a world it would be libertarian, but you'd never elect libertarians to political office today. That's pretty much what I am. Either that, or you interpret "answering truthfully" as reading the questions "controlled by me or the government" as opposed to "controlled by any random individual for himself or the government".
Either way, that test is quite biased. An administration to 40 mostly white-Republican gifted students apparently reported a definite skew towards economic liberalism...I doubt that's what they truly believe.
How to fileshare without getting caught SSL your connection, and only share with known people.
How to bypass porn-blocking school filters Install SSL on a proxy at home. Or guess/brute-force the admin's password.
How to change grades Guess/brute-force a password somewhere, or install a rogue floppy driver. Or use social engineering to be the helpful student who enters in grades.
How to own someone on instant messanger that is pissing me off Guess/brute-force the password and then mess with them. Or just hit "block" - problem solved. Why bother owning them?
How to read my girl/boyfriend's email Guess/brute-force their password. Or use social engineering to get their password from them for whatever bogus reason. Be prepared to break up soon. Honestly, why would you do this?
Actually, why would you risk any of the above (except #4, maybe)? And most of these are trivial to answer but nontrivial in implementation.
Besides, the target for such an activity would be budding geeks and computer half-literates to computer nerds who have a latent skillzset but can't use it legally. This is a deathmatch-style test of skill between people with equal tools. Pwning school authority is easy -- and dangerous. Both of these (lack of challenge and amount of risk) make true hackers and crackers loathe to do so.
BTW, clever homepage. But my Apache installation Bad Request-s me...why?
Give some information on (innocuous) cracking tricks, and with a stern warning "don't take this knowledge back, the school knows we taught you this so you're the first suspects", set them loose on an isolated network of Windows computers with random patches and a firewalled HTTP-only connection (so they can look up techniques). At the end of the round, you get points for the number of computers (possibly including yours) that you have either hard-disk or shell access to.
That would actually be pretty cool. I'll try to convince our computer club to host one, if we can get an isolated network of trashable machines. (You'll need to wipe the disks after the round; otherwise, you'll be using a pre-cracked computer.)
The World's Smallest Political Quiz asks for your opinions on the first two. Our statistics group had to rephrase those questions after our principal censored them. We learned than 90% of students had to be told what a "victimless crime" was. We also learned that the principal cared 0% whether we verbally told how those questions were supposed to read.
We should've just added a bonus question on rock-and-roll to complete the trio.
Slashdot Mirror
That's easily the most retarded thing I've ever read on /.
You must be new here.
Yes, yes, I know, my ID number is higher. But there have been things much more retarded than just an odd phrasing of religios belief.
What, the clause in the scientific method that says "This method cannot be used for religion, 'cause we hate religion"?
A "demonstration that [something] exists" would involve a proof of existence, which is impossible since it boils down to a definition of existence.
Truth, as I used it, is what actually happened. Of course, now you got me to thinking that since there's no way to prove what happened, there may be two or more possible pasts that are equally valid and that can't be eliminated by Occam's Razor...
I promptly vanish in a puff of logic. I'll be back once I figure out how to resolve this. You make a very good point. I think you're the second person on Slashdot that I happily declared a loss of an argument to...because I didn't consider something. (The other debates kinda degenerated through lack of responses from both sides.)
For something like this, you are certainly in the right to demand that the boss use something else for security, simply because of the potential for abuse. This is for encrypting dangerous communication that you don't want authorities or enemies to see or to be able to know that you wrote.
Of course you can't see a logical reason to accept religion. That's not the point. I don't see a religious reason to accept logic. Your instinctive trust of logic is pretty much equivalently rooted to my instinctive trust of God.
The scientific method is powerful and is logical. I agree with it. I have never said that I don't believe that science works, or that it is incorrect. I have never said I believe, and in fact I don't believe, that God created the world at once so that evolutionism arose from a mass of confused scientists and evil conspirators. I am a scientist at heart, as much as I am a Christian.
Yet science is only valid within the realm of science. Your saying that logic precludes a deity is no more valid than my saying that the Bible precludes evolution.
I also believe in Jesus Christ because of what you may call the scientific method: many repeated experiences of the power of God. Note that I do not take Scientology on faith. In it I've seen many repeated examples of corporate abuse of people.
If you want to believe in some crazy story that some other person made up, feel free; but schools are for educating people with things that are useful, not making them believe lies.
"Lies" and "useful" are not opposites. There are, of course, useful lies; as examples from education, there's the kindergarten one that you can't subtract 5 from 3, the middle school one that -4 has no square root, the high school one that subatomic particles are in perpetual motion, etc. There are useless truths, also. You're trying to abuse the connotations of words to help your argument. "some other such nonsense", "superstition (also known as "religion"), etc. are overgeneralizations that you're using to attack religion where doing so serves no purpose except to inflame.
School is perceived to be teaching people truth. Most people don't realize that school teaches you the easiest, most useful explanation -- the few who do will hopefully be able to rationalize creationism vs. evolutionism. If you tell people that science is a model of the universe that's useful for some purposes, then there should be no problem with what's past that. Too often, this crucial fact is ignored. Your statement, "it doesn't claim to be 100% correct", is only true literally. Most people believe this claim, and that's where the problem is.
It's hard to believe that even here, on Slashdot, "news for nerds", so many people are completely ignorant of what science is.
It seems you are the ignorant one; your post contains the hidden misconceived assumptions that science is meant to approach truth (it is meant to make a model of it), that science in the scientific community is science as taught in schools, that science is taught as merely a theory, that religion is incorrect therefore it should not be taught, and that scientific truth is indeed actual truth. Science is a self-consitent, closed-system model of observable data about the real world. It can never be the real world.
The problem is that lots of people have the mistaken assumption that science (and in general, what they learn in school) is "true". Science is simply a self-consistent closed system that models the real world. I agree that science and religion are separate, and neither belong in the other's place. But when we have the state forcing science education combined with a common assumption that the real world is the scientific model, we have a problem.
I fear we may have a new meme on our hands
In Slashdot, posters fear we may have a new X on our hands?
What's with the meme craziness? We went through Soviet Russia and Korea and now to China. Can I finish up the important Communist countries and create In Soviet Cuba, X smokes cigars?
Then you better explain that "science" is only a pragmatic, physical explanation of observed results -- it can make no claim to being "truth". Science is useful, since it's the best way of analyzing things. But it's entirely possible that a deity created the universe as it is such that science reports these results, and science is too small in scope to be able to refute that possibility.
Honestly. Some people treat science like it's a religion or something (pun intended). It's only an explanation. If anything, science is an alternative theory to common organized religion just as much as creationism is an alternative theory to evolution.
The Government has NO RIGHTS!
The People have RIghts. The Government has Powers. There is a difference. Specifically, that Rights are inalienable, and Powers are revocable.
For the purposes of this and almost all discussions that don't mention it, we assume that people have accepted the social contract, and delegated some of their rights of self-rule to the established government so that they may better live with others. You may call these "powers." I call these "rights", since they stem from the natural human rights, and since revoking them (not merely reinterpreting them) amounts to abandoning the social contract, and that seems pretty serious for just video game sale rights to unaccompanied minors.
So, given that these are delegated rights/powers/social contract/whatever you'd like to call them, is my original argument (except for the wording) faulty?
This has been bothering me...that open-source apps, probably inheriting from some UNIX-culture heritage, find some holiness in version numbers.
Give the first thing that works the "1.0" number. The first time it really works, give it 2.0. Let 3.0 be a good version, 4.0 be feature-complete, and 5.0 be really workable.
Or with browsers, try to match the existing numerology: versions 1-4 roughly correspond to the HTML versions, with 4 being reasonably scripting-complete, 5 is an improvement on 4, 6 has extra features, 7+ are major improvements.
I doubt Firefox has much reason to get to 2.0, so I'd prefer to see them drop the "1." part of the number once it gets to about 1.3.
You *cannot* die from abuse of video games...
Tell that to the kid who got beaten to death after his friend watched wrestling on TV, to the family of the overavid Korean gamer who starved to death while addicted to one game for days, to my chemistry teacher whose mildly autistic son cannot be exposed to even cartoon violence for fear that he may go emulate those actions in school.
Not yet, but I imagine that it soon will be. The Government thinks it is a better parent than you and knows what is best for your family.
Huh? Your argument runs, "No, but I would claim it to possibly be so because I like to attack the government. I attack the government."
There are restrictions on governmental rights. This is the reason retailers (aka evil corporations) normally check for age on mature games: the parents are supposed to approve the game for the kids.
Yahoo! Mail, too.
Although I wish it would just block images below, say, 10x10, or just for messages that are almost possibly spam (but not enough to be filtered). It's really annoying to have some newsletter in graphic form display as a big gray rectangle with unsubscribe and copyright info below it.
Since when is wardriving illegal?
Since wardriving was accessing other people's privately-owned networks, with a reasonable expectation of privacy (most people won't try to wardrive for a connection when they don't have their own), possibly for the purpose of accessing other computers on the network behind the firewall.
About the public/private thing: driveways, a large lawn/garden, private parks in housing communities, private roads and parking lots, etc. are still private property on which you can be convicted for trespassing. Even the local mall can have you arrested for trespassing if you violate their rules (no loud music, no spamming cars with fliers, etc.). So it's pretty hard to claim a WiFi network is "public" -- which you're probably basing on the fact they didn't secure it. Is it considered "public" if you use a combination lock on something with a keyhole on the back and other people may have the master key?
Um, how about a porn filter?
We've got a pretty nice (technically nice, not helpfully nice) filter at our school district's big router that blocks sites by category. I'm sure you could unblock just "hacking" for this activity. Most porn sites, banner ads, Goatses, etc. are thankfully blocked - I've never accidentally come across one at school.
That's quite an impressive writing piece for something you just whipped up for slashdot. You've restored my faith in the school system.
Fallacious causation there. I find that my spontaneous discussion skills are far more improved by practicing writing on Slashdot than by anything we've done in class.
Hopefully this'll help me on the New SAT's essay....
Windows XP
You do know you can get Windows Media Player for Mac, right?
I'd suspect that you are what could be called libertarian idealist, that is, if you could create a world it would be libertarian, but you'd never elect libertarians to political office today. That's pretty much what I am. Either that, or you interpret "answering truthfully" as reading the questions "controlled by me or the government" as opposed to "controlled by any random individual for himself or the government".
Either way, that test is quite biased. An administration to 40 mostly white-Republican gifted students apparently reported a definite skew towards economic liberalism...I doubt that's what they truly believe.
How to fileshare without getting caught
SSL your connection, and only share with known people.
How to bypass porn-blocking school filters
Install SSL on a proxy at home. Or guess/brute-force the admin's password.
How to change grades
Guess/brute-force a password somewhere, or install a rogue floppy driver.
Or use social engineering to be the helpful student who enters in grades.
How to own someone on instant messanger that is pissing me off
Guess/brute-force the password and then mess with them. Or just hit "block" - problem solved. Why bother owning them?
How to read my girl/boyfriend's email
Guess/brute-force their password. Or use social engineering to get their password from them for whatever bogus reason. Be prepared to break up soon. Honestly, why would you do this?
Actually, why would you risk any of the above (except #4, maybe)? And most of these are trivial to answer but nontrivial in implementation.
Besides, the target for such an activity would be budding geeks and computer half-literates to computer nerds who have a latent skillzset but can't use it legally. This is a deathmatch-style test of skill between people with equal tools. Pwning school authority is easy -- and dangerous. Both of these (lack of challenge and amount of risk) make true hackers and crackers loathe to do so.
BTW, clever homepage. But my Apache installation Bad Request-s me...why?
Will you get presidentially pardoned, so that you can use the internets?
A Doom movie?
Bio-Force Deal.
(Hint: this is a reference to the renaming of the BFG...)
Request to moderators: Mod down anyone who says "I know I'll be modded down for this."
You do realize that you're saying that in every post, right?
That's a really good idea.
Give some information on (innocuous) cracking tricks, and with a stern warning "don't take this knowledge back, the school knows we taught you this so you're the first suspects", set them loose on an isolated network of Windows computers with random patches and a firewalled HTTP-only connection (so they can look up techniques). At the end of the round, you get points for the number of computers (possibly including yours) that you have either hard-disk or shell access to.
That would actually be pretty cool. I'll try to convince our computer club to host one, if we can get an isolated network of trashable machines. (You'll need to wipe the disks after the round; otherwise, you'll be using a pre-cracked computer.)
The World's Smallest Political Quiz asks for your opinions on the first two. Our statistics group had to rephrase those questions after our principal censored them. We learned than 90% of students had to be told what a "victimless crime" was. We also learned that the principal cared 0% whether we verbally told how those questions were supposed to read.
We should've just added a bonus question on rock-and-roll to complete the trio.